ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Artif. Intell.
Sec. Medicine and Public Health
Physician Perceptions of Artificial Intelligence in Northern Italy Healthcare: A Survey of Fears and Expectations
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences of Children and Adults,, University Hospital of Modena, Modena, Italy
- 2University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, MODENA, Italy
- 3Catholic University of the Sacred Heart Milan, Italy, milano, Italy
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is more and more spreading but despite the clear evidence of benefits related to its implementation, many physicians worry about ethical, legal, employment and professional changes that AI is going to induce. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether and why physicians worry about AI. This study is a cross-sectional survey addressed to a group of 362 Northern Italy hospitals physicians, both specialists and residents from selected specialties were asked to fill in a 27 multiple-choice online survey submitted by e-mail. The survey aimed to evaluate their opinions and expectations about the impact of AI on clinical, employment and ethical topics. The results were evaluated by the software Stata that enabled to carry out a multivariate analysis with the evaluation of the statistical significance of the results obtained. 176 physicians (48%) answered the survey. The knowledge of the topic “AI” was reported as mild in 47%, poor in 30% and good in 15%; 98% of the responders believe that AI will improve medical activities, in particular by reducing medical errors. The legal problems, the worsening of the relationship with the patients and the deep changes of the medical role have been considered its most negative expected consequences. From an employment point of view, most responders believe that the AI cause the replacement of physicians by other professional figures. The most frequent sensations caused by AI are optimism (34%), worry (30%) and enthusiasm (13%), while anxiety is reported by 9% of the responders. Deep changes in the formation of physicians and residents are deemed to be necessary. Gender influences the response given on the effects of AI: women tend to be overall more pessimistic, predicting greater impacts on training, with a substantially negative feeling and with a lower probability of easing litigation. The responses are not correlated with the doctor’s specialty of the respondent. The region, which influences the responses on training and feelings, does not influence the response on the effect of AI on litigation. The respondents' origins and the selection of some medical specialties must be considered limitations of the reported analysis.
Keywords: Artificial intelligence (AI), Survey, Public Health, Benefits, Negative effects, training, Employment, mood
Received: 07 May 2025; Accepted: 27 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Torricelli, Torricelli, Sandi and Pecchi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Annarita Pecchi, annarita.pecchi@unimore.it
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